Forty Years On

Tim Stanley writes:

This Sunday marks the 40th anniversary of the Watergate scandal, and its heroes are milking the memories for all they’re worth. The infamous bungled burglary of the Democratic headquarters at the Watergate Hotel, on June 17 1972, has generated an industry in investigative journalism and repetitive use of the suffix “gate” (although Cameron’s Pastygate doesn’t quite compare). The story’s demon is Republican President Richard M Nixon, who supposedly ordered the break-in and its cover-up. Its angels are reporters Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward, who hounded Nixon from the pages of The Washington Post until the truth came to light and he was forced to resign. It’s a great story of good vs evil. A lot of it is also bunk.

Much of what we know about the Watergate scandal is gleaned from the Watergate tapes – recordings from bugs that Nixon placed around the White House to spy on his staff. The discovery of the tapes was seen at the time as proof that Nixon was a paranoid psychotic. In fact, it was a fine presidential tradition. When he first took residence, Nixon was horrified to discover that his predecessor – Lyndon B Johnson – had installed taping devices everywhere, even under his bed. At first Nixon tore the bugs out. But after his administration was beset with leaks and betrayals, he put them back in. Historians are grateful that he did: thanks to Nixon, we have a pretty good idea about what did and didn’t happen during Watergate.

The picture that emerges is of an administration that was convinced it was the victim of a liberal conspiracy so great that it required an equally ingenious conspiracy to defeat it. The paranoia was justified. Back in 1960, Jack Kennedy had beaten Richard Nixon to the presidency with a little help from his friends in Illinois and Texas (the dead can’t lie, but they can sure vote Democrat).

Nixon takes responsibility for creating a fevered air within the White House that encouraged zealous officials to engage in “dirty tricks”, but there’s no evidence at all that he ordered the Watergate break-in. The crime he did commit was instructing an aide to ask the CIA to ask the FBI to stop investigating it. This attempted obstruction of justice was ignored by both agencies and Nixon never raised the matter again. Thereafter, he blundered, and played right into the hands of the partisan congressional committee assessing his guilt.

And his prosecutors were certainly partisan. The Washington Post was published by a staunch Democrat and friend to the Kennedys, Katharine Graham. Some conspiracy theorists assert that Woodward was a CIA agent planted at the Post to receive and spread anti-Nixon material leaked from within the administration. Not likely, but a lot of his Watergate reporting has since been critiqued as exaggerated or lacking in evidence.

Meanwhile, Nixon’s reputation has gone from strength to strength. His public image was one of a conservative thug, but in private he was an intellectual powerhouse with a human side (he could easily have made it as a concert pianist and he loved his French poodle, Vicky). He could be so sentimental that he cried when he sacked aides who were implicated in the Watergate scandal.

Moreover, in an age of Tea Party conservatives, many Americans miss Nixon’s brand of moderate Republicanism. He was the president who established affirmative action in government hiring, built the Environmental Protection Agency, ended the war in Vietnam and opened up relations with China. Come back, Tricky Dick. All is forgiven.

Nixon was forced out over something that no one really found shocking then any more than we would find it shocking now, although I suppose that we ought to mourn the passing of a world in which they felt obliged to pretend that they were shocked by it. He was forced out by the motley crew that had sought to replace Johnson with Bobby Kennedy as the Democratic nominee in 1968: the not always mutually exclusive categories of Friedmanites and Trotskyites, Israel Firsters and white supremacists; in the California primary, Kennedy had denounced Eugene McCarthy’s support for public housing as a “catastrophic” proposal to move black people into Orange County.

Nixon suspended the draft, he pursued détente with China and with the USSR, and he ended the Vietnam War along with Ford, an old stalwart of the America First Committee who went on to sign the Helsinki Accords. Nixon believed in wage and price control as surely as in the Clean Air Act and in the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency, as surely as in the War on Cancer and in the War on Drugs, as surely as in Title IX (banning sex discrimination in federally funded education) and in the desegregation of schools in the Deep South, and as surely as that the United States should launch no war over the Soviet Union’s treatment of its Zionist dissidents, who have turned out to have been just as unpleasant in their own way as were many other categories of those who happened to dissent from the Soviet regime, and who now constitute a significant obstacle to peace in the Middle East, where they are busily engaged in denaturalising both the indigenous Christians and the ultra-Orthodox Jews.